Build your app or service right from the get-go
Save with an Identity solution that won’t slow you down as you scale
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The process of building up your app or service involves not just, well, building the app or service, but also the foundational tech you need to support that process and your end result.
Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) often face tough decisions about where to spend funds, time, and mental bandwidth. For example, you might use Twilio for communication or Stripe for online payments, because buying those tools gives time back to your team and removes the burden of building and maintaining it yourself.
One of the most important foundational elements is how you handle Identity and Access Management (IAM). Like other tools, there are a lot of options when it comes to deciding on an effective IAM solution.
- Build from scratch
- Purchase point solutions
- Invest in bundled features
Each path needs resources for the project to succeed, but what those resources are may differ. You want solutions that can scale with you, improve your time to market, and make your users happy, all without costing a fortune. You need an option that extends, scales, and supports your business at every step.
Businesses often overlook key areas. This blog aims to provide valuable insight and practical guidance to help navigate the app-building process and help make informed decisions about Identity that support your business for the marathon of success, not just the sprint to market.
How to build it right
Today, it’s a login box. But what will the market, users, and partners require of you tomorrow? How do you prepare when market expectations and technology are always changing?
There’s more to choosing a robust Identity ecosystem to support your business than what products are available. Time to market, reliability, scalability, data, and security are all potentially affected.
Don’t underestimate the complexity of a complete Identity service
Identity is complex. Feature and system complexity can be underestimated and in a state of constant evolution. In-house development resources may be able to handle Identity basics such as account creation, login, and password reset. However, advanced features like single sign-on (SSO) support, customer data partitioning, token authentication, multi-factor authentication (MFA), social login, and LDAP/Active Directory integration, require considerably greater effort to build and maintain.
When considering solutions, scour IAM company websites and consider products and features. What functionality will you need right away, or a year from now? If certain products or functionality are not included, could you build them with the team you have now without draining resources from the core business? Will you need to hire specialists or dedicate dev resources in the future?
Common Identity and Access Management requirements
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IAM component |
Description |
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Admin UI |
Admin user interface for managing users, apps, and APIs with scoped admin roles |
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Authentication policies |
Configurable policies and policy framework to control sign-in based on context, like user, app, group, geolocation, IP range, behavior, device, etc. |
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Build authorization server |
Build an authorization engine for business logic, including customizable scopes and claims |
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Customer UI |
Customer service or help desk UI to manage customer profile information with scoped admin roles |
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Deploy directory with extensible profile/user/ groups/clients |
A scalable user repository that provides a flexible user profile and groups and includes Directory App server, Database, App Database, and Encryption. |
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Deploy token service |
A scalable service to track each user session, with ongoing database maintenance and patching. |
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Directory/IDP integration |
Create integrations with outside directories such as AD/LDAP and support inbound federation via SAML, OIDC, and WS-Fed for existing IDPs |
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Gateway integration |
Integrate with API gateways such as Apigee and Mulesoft |
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Implement protocols |
Learn and amortize specs for SAML, OIDC, OAuth 2.0 |
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MFA |
High availability, redundant MFA with multiple factor support (SMS, voice, email, Google Authenticator, biometrics, Push) |
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Operating system set-up, maintenance and lockdown |
Customization of operating system and server software to eliminate security vulnerabilities |
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Password storage and security |
Hashing of passwords with the most up-to-date algorithms and continuous maintenance as methods evolve |
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Provisioning connectors |
Custom-build, maintain, and test API-based connectors to hand CRUD functions |
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Provisioning engine |
Engine for managing user objects in downstream services |
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Registration, sign-in, account recovery, MFA screens |
Building user interfaces and workflows, hosting of sign-in and registration pages |
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Reporting |
Dashboard to see the overall health of users and applications; easy access to metrics and user reports for compliance purposes |
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Social auth and profile sync |
Broker authentication for any social Identity provider and sync profile attributes |
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SSO connectors |
Custom-build, maintain, and test SSO connectors for third-party apps |
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Terminate SSL |
Create and maintain a secure connection with any client over https; manage a web certificate for a domain; set up and maintain/patch strong SSL/TLS. Keep cryptography up-to-date. |
Prepare for scope creep
As your business grows, users may demand greater functionality and richer features. The scope creep drive is, in some ways, a natural result of end users demanding more features, functionality, and seamless experiences. At the same time, predicting future needs or user volumes can be hard when your applications first take off. Scope creep rates are high and, in some ways, expected — while rates vary, companies without project scope management experience scope creep with 66% of projects, while companies with scope management experience scope creep with 39% of projects. It’s not impossible to fall victim to your success if you’re not prepared.
However, customers today increasingly demand greater functionality and security, which often increases the scope of projects. Additionally, companies quickly begin building additional applications and may find themselves reinventing the wheel if development teams are not in constant communication. As a result, individual teams often underestimate the difficulty of building a complete, future-proofed Identity service, which causes deadlines (and ROI) to slip.
Get ready to maintain — and evolve
When planning out Identity, remember to include ongoing efforts to maintain, update, scale, and innovate.
Identity requirements are also constantly evolving. Standards, requirements, and technologies may need ongoing expertise and budget to remain up-to-date. SAML and WS-Fed have evolved to more modern standards like OpenID Connect and OAuth 2.0. Elements within these standards have evolved as vulnerabilities have been found. Further, enterprise requirements like deprovisioning access to APIs by revoking tokens may not have been initially contemplated in the standard. If you plan on having enterprise-sized customers or already do, you’ll need to build and maintain enterprise-grade security that satisfies their compliance requirements.
Preparing for open sourceOpen-source solutions are appealing for their price point. But remember: They aren’t always “free.” You will always face costs when it comes to developer time to install software, try and test it, find bugs, evaluate the security and vulnerability of the components, and complete regular DIY maintenance and future-proofing. There’s rarely a support service built in to open-source solutions. Maintenance and future-proofing are ultimately your responsibility. You, the company, are in charge and responsible for exposure to potential security risks related to a lack of automatic updates and vulnerability patching in open-source code. |
For information about what compliance requirements apply to your business and industry and whether you can use Okta’s services to meet them, you should contact your legal counsel. Information about Okta’s compliance with a range of industry-standard certifications and authorizations can be found here.
Even if your project avoids scope creep (or the need to scale and adapt with your user base), ongoing maintenance costs are a reality you will need to contend with. Providing seamless upgrades and maintenance to ensure uninterrupted service adds overhead, possibly quickly, as the market shifts and changes. Maintenance alone can leech developer resources away from your core product.
Align on developer resources
How you deploy developers can make your company excel. While Identity isn’t your core business offering, as a foundational component that supports your entire business, it needs to be maintained like it is. For SMBs, people often need to wear multiple hats, which means carefully managing IT and developer talent.
Organizations can also underestimate the specialized technical expertise needed to build a secure and scalable Identity function for their applications. It requires team members with diverse technical knowledge, including cryptography, database security, performance engineering, system engineering, security auditing, and advanced data architecture to manage authorization. Specialist development resources are scarce, meaning many organizations may have trouble finding the resources to finish the job in-house — particularly on a tight deadline.
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Power Tip: When you're building, watch out for common pitfalls to avoid.
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Alternatives to building
There are benefits to the initially cheaper cost of DIY solution and maintaining control over portions of your stack. That’s if you have time, talent, and capital. But if the overall cost of building doesn’t make sense for your goals, offloading some of that burden onto a pre-built tool is the next logical step.
It all comes down to a balance of resources. Development teams have increasingly turned to pre-built tools to offload some of the burden of app development. IAM presents developers with a broad range of challenges that a trusted Identity layer can help offload easily. This is a sound strategy for companies of all sizes that want to accelerate time-to-market, reduce costs, focus development teams on core functionality, and realize a host of other benefits.
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Unsure about must-haves or where to start with Identity? Read our SMB Identity Checklist to get acquainted with the questions you should ask when planning your Identity solution. |
The potential pitfalls of buying are similar to those of building it yourself. Half-measures are the enemy, creating a scenario of not fully committing, only to realize it’s not a tenable long-term solution. This often happens with point solution purchases, perhaps added later in the app development process or after dev resources have been spread thin. Unfortunately, tech debt can rack up quickly as tech silos are potential new points of failure built into your ecosystem. All those point solutions will, at some point, have to go through replatforming.
How to buy it right
1. Lay groundwork
- Scope out your current, most immediate needs.
- Identify where you want to be in six months.
- Identify where you want to be in a year.
- Collectively agree on must-haves and components that accelerate your roadmap.
2. Research options
- Research Identity service providers.
- Effectively narrow your search.
- Check with peers, community boards, analysts, and customers.
- Check that your top three potential providers can meet your must-haves list.
3. Test it (at a small scale) and expand incrementally
- Look at solutions that offer a quick way to ideate on and test them.
- Extra points if the solution offers you a pay-as-you-go/grow route
- Look at solutions with comprehensive getting started guides.
- Check for a strong community in case something breaks or you have questions on the way.
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Pro buyers’ tip |
Proof of concept
If you’re curious about what an IDaaS provider can do for you, jump into a free trial and spin up a POC. This is a fantastic way to get your hands on a product and gather data yourself. How quickly can devs spin it into a workable model and test it? How easy and available are resources and documentation to access and use? Is customer support or sales available to answer questions? Is the company otherwise enjoyable to work with?
Learn more
No matter where your Identity journey takes your business, knowledge is your strength. To save time and get up to speed, check out the SMB Okta homepage to learn more about how Identity can help SMBs. Or read our on-the-go checklist for SMBs, with the top ways Identity can further support your business and how to plan for the future.
Curious about what Okta has to offer locally? We have a 30-day free trial you can try today.
Further questions? We have resources specially made to help SMBs below, and our Sales team is ready to field any questions you might have.
These materials and any recommendations within are not legal, privacy, security, compliance, or business advice. These materials are intended for general informational purposes only and may not reflect the most current security, privacy, and legal developments nor all relevant issues. You are responsible for obtaining legal, security, privacy, compliance, or business advice from your own lawyer or other professional advisor and should not rely on the recommendations herein. Okta is not liable to you for any loss or damages that may result from your implementation of any recommendations in these materials. Okta makes no representations, warranties, or other assurances regarding the content of these materials. Information regarding Okta's contractual assurances to its customers can be found at okta.com/agreements.
Resources
SMB Identity buyers’ checklist
Secure your Small Business with Identity
